MEET NUGGET

Hi my dear furriends! This is the story of Nugget and how he went from an abandoned kitten to an intrepid explorer cat.

We are Niall and Elena, Nugget’s parents, and this is also a bit of our story. We are both from Europe – Ireland and Spain – and we were making one of our life’s dreams come true; to travel around New Zealand in a campervan!

We spent three months converting ‘Fernie’, our campervan, into our little home on wheels and started to travel from Auckland on the 1st of March 2020. Little did we know that a few weeks later the whole world was going to go into lockdown due to a global pandemic. In New Zealand the lockdown started the 24th of March and it lasted for a total of 7 weeks.

The only place we had to stay was Fernie and since we couldn’t travel during lockdown, we thought it would be best to find a nice campsite where we could also shower and have Wi-Fi – two of the greatest things for backpackers!

We moved with Fernie to a campsite in Patea, in the South Taranaki area. Patea is a small town of 1000 people where we had to drive for 30 minutes just to get to the closest supermarket. We had the best lockdown ever – there were more animals than humans at our campsite!

The 19th of April is the day that Nugget came into our lives. One of the women who was staying at the campsite was walking her dog by the river when she started to hear very loud meows coming from somewhere nearby. Luckily the dog was able to find a little 3 week old Nugget in a pile of logs.

Nugget came straight away into our care as we had room for him to sleep with us in our van. We were not planning on rescuing a cat during our trip, so the first couple of weeks, all of his stuff was very improvised. His bed was a cardboard box with a teddy and a couple of kitchen towels, his litter box was another cardboard box with sand from the beach and his toys were basically leaves.

For several days we went back to the place where he was found but we could never find any other kittens or Nugget’s mom. The first days we were just taking care of him, not thinking about adopting him at all. He was a baby cat that was on his own and we were going to continue travelling after lockdown so we didn’t think the three of us staying together could work. Things changed when we realised that Nugget had bad diarrhea and we decided to take him to the local vet for a check-up. We were so concerned about him that day that it made us realise we couldn’t leave him behind when lockdown finished.

We spent the days watching him, feeding him, playing with him and cuddling him while he slept. We fell in love with our little Nugget and we needed to come up with a plan to make everything work. We knew that Nugget could be an adventure cat because every morning when we had breakfast, we spent 3-4 hours outside with him exploring the surroundings of the campsite; playing with leaves, trying to catch bugs and running after our feet.

Our life in the campsite was easy: he slept with us inside the campervan, played around the kitchen area while we had breakfast and went for walks around the campsite. All of that was about to change after lockdown and we needed to make it work. The van was always parked, so we started to bring Nugget along with us on our trips to the supermarket. The first few times we started the engine, Nugget was scared, but he got over it quite quickly. Thankfully, our van has three seats in the front and the middle seat became Nugget’s. We also had his litter box on the co-pilots feet area (at this point we moved on from a cardboard litter box to an oven tray – regular litter boxes were way too big for the space we had in the van) and his bowls for food and water were in the glove compartment. He got used to the van and the driving around very fast. In the end, that’s where he slept, played and ate with us.

At this point, Nugget was around 5 weeks old and, as we said, we were in the middle of nowhere, so we didn’t have a way to get him a harness. Ordering online wasn’t an option either. Lockdown was on for more than the 4 weeks originally established, so we didn’t know when we were going to be able to leave. Also living in a campervan kind of complicates the shipment of parcels!

During lockdown in New Zealand we could still go out for walks. Even though we didn’t have a harness for him, we wanted him to get used to different environments and to learn that he was always safe around us. He wasn’t really fast and he always wanted to walk by our side, so it was very easy to keep track of him. We started to take him on walks to the beach or by the golf course in town. We also took our backpacks with us, so he got used to going inside it too.

The days were passing fast. Nugget was 7-8 weeks when we heard that lockdown was about to finish. We left the campsite in Patea the 15th of May and the first thing we did was to go to the vet again. When we took him during lockdown because of his diarrhea we couldn’t go inside the building or barely talk to the vet. And we had SO many questions! We made an appointment to get started with his shots and to microchip him – in New Zealand it is not mandatory to chip cats, only dogs, but we think is one of the first things you need to do once you get a pet, especially if you are going to travel around. We also needed to know if we could get the shots in different vets around the country, as we only stayed a maximum of 2 nights per place. That day Nugget was chipped, but we couldn’t start with his shots as the vet said he was still too small for it! Also, in the vet consult we got him his harness! We had to buy a rabbit harness (H type) from the brand Trixie, and even at the smallest, it was slightly big for him. Buying his harness was a great relief, we were back on the road for the first day and we couldn’t leave him roaming around on his own anymore!

New Zealand is the perfect country if you want to live the van life. There are plenty of public toilets, freedom camps and even public showers! Every morning we let Nugget roam off leash around the campervan (with our supervision) during breakfast, only if the place we parked was quiet enough for him. We played with him for a while and we hit the road. 95% of the time driving in the van, Nugget slept. We arrived at the place we were visiting that day and took him with us – some days it was a beach, some days it was a mountain, some days a park. Every day was different! Nugget got used to the harness real fast, I can’t even point out a single time where the harness bothered him. Getting himself tangled with the leash is a different story lol, he still hasn’t fully understood this!

The days went by, we crossed to the South Island of New Zealand and kept travelling. The southern we got, the colder it got too. One day we slept in Arthur’s Pass and it was -1 celsius degrees, we woke up with ice inside the van. Nugget loved licking the windows tho. But we also realised it was time to settle down, find a warm house for the winter – yes, it is winter in New Zealand now – and start to prepare Nugget’s paperwork; because he is coming back home with us! We have settled down in Queenstown for the moment, but we still go on catventures every week. In the meantime, Nugget finished all his shots, got neutered and got the rabies vaccine too – mandatory in order to fly to Europe!

All this time we made great friends along the way – real friends that were impressed by seeing such an adventurous little kitten, and online friends through Nugget’s instagram! It has been a journey. We didn’t even know that you could walk cats before we got Nugget, but he gave us a lesson, and we keep learning every day with him. Sometimes we get asked how we teach him and honestly I think we had it easier than anyone. Nugget grew up (since he was 3 weeks until he was 3 months) with us in the campervan, he spent half of his day outdoors and we – and Fernie – were the only things that remained the same while everything else kept changing. He’s a very well behaved cat that loves walks because it was what he thought was normal. We can’t wait to show him the world and we are thankful for this amazing world we have discovered with him!

Nugget’s instagram account is @nugget_thetravellingcat if you want to give him a follow!